For most opera companies, staging Wagner’s Ring Cycle means surrendering to its enormity: four operas, roughly 16 hours of music drama, titanic orchestral and vocal forces and an audience commitment that borders on pilgrimage. 

The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra is attempting something different, something more spin cycle than Ring Cycle.

On 29 and 30 May in the majestic Adelaide Town Hall, ASO Chief Conductor Mark Wigglesworth will lead the orchestra in Henk de Vlieger’s The Ring: An Orchestral Adventure – a concentrated traversal of Wagner’s mythic universe that compresses gods, giants, dragons, fire and redemption into a single symphonic arc. And it’s only 60 minutes long.

“Anyone can be daunted by the Ring in its 16-hour version,” Wigglesworth says. “I’d like to think that this hour version is a doorway for people. A gateway drug!”

Mark Wigglesworth

Mark Wigglesworth. Photo © Sim Canetty-Clarke

Created in 1991 by Dutch percussionist and arranger Henk de Vlieger, The Ring: An Orchestral Adventure distils the sprawling architecture of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen into what De Vlieger described as “a solid one-part symphonic work” in which “the main plot lines, as in a symphonic poem, are clearly recognisable”.

His arrangement...